Electronic Book Review - j.c. herzhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/jc-herz
enInteractive Fictionhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/fictive
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<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Nick Montfort</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-04-17</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Asking whether a new media artifact is a story or a game is like asking of a poem: Which is it? Narrative or metrical? This contrived question holds two dangers. Most obviously, it suggests that narrative and meter are somehow opposing forces in poetry, indeed, that they are exclusive. The further danger is its implicit presupposition, that these are the only two interesting aspects of a poem. We almost certainly would benefit from considering whether the poem is book-length or short, if it is schematically alliterative, what themes it treats, if it is in a traditional or invented form, and what traditions it works in or against, but the first dichotomy, by distracting with its false opposition, disguises the other important aspects of the poem because it silently claims that there are only two important aspects.</p>
<p>Advocates of game studies and ludology have rallied against the simplistic consideration of computer games as stories, resisting what they refer as the “colonization” of the new field by literary studies as they build up their rebel fleet on the ice planet. Of course their project is not to banish discussion of story from computer game studies (how could it be, when half the articles in the premiere issue of the journal <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> take the issue of narrative as their central topic?) but to ensure that discussion is framed in terms of a new discipline, native to the computer game. Discourse about new media, at its best, no longer concerns itself with the mythical story/game dichotomy. Instead critics like Henry Jenkins are considering in detail the many ways that story is involved with, produced by, or reflected in games, and pointing out that aspects such as the simulated environment are often more important than the “story,” even when we have determined what exactly that is (Game-Stories 2001). Janet Murray describes other, overlapping categories: “puzzle” and “contest,” creating a Venn diagram with four circles instead of just the usual “story” and “game” categories (Game-Stories 2001). Even in this view, however, the Venn diagram that Murray offers collapses apples and oranges into the same plane. Story, game, and puzzle are better viewed as aspects of new media vectors in an n-dimensional space, some of which are orthogonal and some of which are not rather than categories, even intersecting categories. Even this concept is lacking in some ways. What is important to realize is that while there are such things as “games” and “stories,” many new media artifacts are neither of these, but employ elements from both. They employ elements from other forms and can be understood using other figures, too. What is important to distinguish about these different aspects and elements is which of them are essential to which well-defined categories of new media artifacts, and how they are or are not tied to one another.</p>
<p>Making broad claims about “new media” or even “computer games” can be problematic. There are new media forms that are reasonable categories: the massively muliplayer role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the hypertext novel, the chatterbot. Whatever the difficulties with definitions, we know a first-person shooter, like obscenity, when we see it. I focus here on one new media form, recognized by authors and interactors to be its own category: interactive fiction. Examples of interactive fiction, abbreviated as IF, include <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span> and <span class="booktitle">Zork</span>; later literary efforts <span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>, <span class="booktitle">Trinity</span>, <span class="booktitle">Amnesia</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span>; and more recent works such as <span class="booktitle">Curses</span> and <span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>. Rather than begin with a definition of IF, I’ll go through a series of figures that can be used to understand the form beginning with story and game, but not stopping there and conclude by considering which of these figures are defining and which are important to the poetics of interactive fiction.</p>
<h2>Story</h2>
<p>Even IF that clearly has puzzle-solving as its only pleasure works that make fortune cookies seem florid produce narratives as a result of sessions of interaction. Here is a concrete example of how IF is potential narrative, a space of possibility in which the user’s inputs, parsed as actions, become part of a narrative text:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Orange River Chamber</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from east and west sides of the chamber.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">&gt;TAKE BIRD</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You catch the bird in the wicker cage.</p>
<p>This text is a minimal story, by Gerald Prince’s (1973) definition, produced in a session of interaction with <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. The initial state has an adventurer in a cave chamber with a little bird. The adventurer types “TAKE BIRD” to take the bird. Then, as a result, the bird is in the wicker cage.</p>
<h2>Game</h2>
<p>Jesper Juul, after demonstrating that the case for story in computer games is overstated, adds that “many computer games contain narrative elements” (Juul 2001). Reversing this formulation works better for IF. It is a potential narrative that may contain game elements. Some interactive fiction works cannot be “won” and do not keep score: Emily Short’s <span class="booktitle">Galatea</span> and Ian Finley’s <span class="booktitle">Exhibition</span> are examples. They are not games by the definition Eric Zimmerman gives, <cite id="note_1">Games have an explicit rule system, according to Zimmerman, and they have a definite result or outcome. This definition was described by him in the “Aesthetics of Game Design” panel at Computers and Video Games Come of Age, and in the “Game-Stories: Simulation, Narrative, Addiction” panel at SIGGRAPH 2001. This distinguishes games and more general play activity very well, which is what the definition evidently was created to do, but it does not distinguish between games and puzzles as well as I would like, or indeed at all.</cite> and only by liberally extending the concept of “symbolic reward” would they be games by Espen Aarseth’s definition. <cite id="note_2">Games provide “symbolic rewards,” in Aarseth’s formulation, which may be in the form of higher scores or in some other form. This would possibly allow for a Furby or Tamagotchi to be a game, because growth and good behavior of these creatures might be a reward, but it would rule out slot machines and vending machines, which dispense real, rather than symbolic, rewards. This was described by Aarseth in a talk to a Comparative Media Studies seminar at MIT in February 2001.</cite> I prefer to define game as a contest (one of the categories Murray distinguished) but a contest broadly defined, either played directly against one or more players or played individually in an attempt to break a record or achieve a superior score. Game elements are used in interactive fiction to convey the extent of a work (a score of 20 out of 250 replaces being on page 20 of 250) and to provide what hypertext theorists and pop psychologists call “closure,” but they are seldom used to actually structure a contest. Hence the popular way of referring to IF works, as “games,” highlights an aspect of IF that is not fundamental, and suggests a figure that is not one of the more useful ones for understanding the form.</p>
<h2>Storygame</h2>
<p>Mary Ann Buckles, author of the first dissertation on interactive fiction, suggests a different concept, that of the “storygame,” for understanding the form. Although Buckles writes that “in <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>, the game is embedded in a story” (Buckles 1985, 32), her term suggests that rather than one element being embedded in the other, both are essential to the experience and are intertwined rather than nested. <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span> is a precomputer case of an experience that inextricably merges story and game and performance as well. <cite id="note_3">I have not mentioned performance until now because the term seems to have little direct relevance to interactive fiction and has not dominated the discourse around computer games the way that “story” and “game” have. However, the performing arts are rich in figures that may help in understanding interactive fiction too rich to treat well in a short essay like this. See particularly Laurel 1986, 74ñ81, which treats <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> in dramatic terms; <span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span> author Robert Pinsky also emphasized the applicability of the dramatic perspective to IF poetics in his MIT Media Lab Colloquium in February 1997.</cite> One cannot simply remove the story from <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span> the way that the narrative cut-scenes in <span class="booktitle">Ms. Pac-Man</span> can be lifted away. Nor can the aspects of contest be removed without changing the experience into something other than <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span>. IF works can, similarly, involve story and game essentially but neither quality is part of IF’s foundation. The “story” that occurs emerges through interaction, and what is commonly thought of as “game” in the form is when it is present better understood through other figures.</p>
<h2>Novel</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span> and other Synapse titles were labeled “electronic novels.” Some IF works (including those) typically take many hours of interaction to complete. Other works, such as those entered in the annual IF competition <a class="outbound" href="http://ifcomp.org/">http://ifcomp.org/</a>, are designed to be completed within two hours. Seeing those in the former category as “novels” and the latter sort as “short stories” is a sensible way to describe how much interaction time is required. It is not particularly the case, however, that aesthetic or poetic principles of the novel vis-ý-vis the short story apply to these two sorts of works. It is not in fact obvious that IF is more closely tied to traditions of written prose than to other literary traditions.</p>
<h2>World</h2>
<p>IF accepts natural-language text from the interactor and produces text in reply, but the same can be said for the stand-alone chatterbot <span class="booktitle">Racter</span> or a database that takes English-like queries. What distinguishes IF from these systems is that in addition to a “parser” there is another essential element of an IF work: a “world model.” Aristotle held that a play could exist even without characters, but never without a plot (Aristotle 1961). In IF, it is the world (like the literary “setting”) that is essential characters and plot can be dispensed with, but a system is not IF unless it simulates a world, however erratically and in however limited a way.</p>
<h2>Literature</h2>
<p>Accepting the ideas of Russian Formalism, and specifically Victor Shklovsky’s (1965) concept that the literary nature of a text comes from its “making strange” ordinary reality, it’s evident that not just the textual output of IF but even the nature of many IF puzzles hinge on their literariness (Randall 1988). Although variation between the <span class="foreignWord">sjuzet</span> and the <span class="foreignWord">fabula</span> is not the main device used to accomplish this (it is employed at times for instance, in Adam Cadre’s <span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>) IF does use the technique of literary art “to make objects unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 1965).</p>
<h2>Puzzle</h2>
<p>A puzzle is a formal test of ingenuity. A jigsaw puzzle is, of course, a puzzle, as is a scrambled Rubik’s Cube or a verbally posed logic problem or lateral thinking puzzle. The device of the puzzle is described as essential to IF by Graham Nelson, creator of the IF development system Inform and author of <span class="booktitle">Curses</span>: “Without puzzles, or problems, or mechanisms to allow the player to receive the text a little at a time… there is no interaction” (Nelson, 2001, 382). But IF has been devised without puzzles; conversation and exploration rather than puzzle-solving allow one to move further through these works while interacting. Undoubtedly, the puzzle provides the main effective way to engage the interactor deeply. Dealing with explicit puzzles, however, involves a mode of thought alien to ordinary reading; progress through the text of a novel is not arrested when the reader comes up with the wrong answer. As important as the puzzle has been, finding a way in which the puzzle-solving and reading aspects of IF work together instead of in opposition is also important.</p>
<h2>Problem</h2>
<p>The single academic article about <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> by its creators does not use the word “puzzle.” The challenges in <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> are instead referred to by Lebling, Blank, and Anderson (1979) as “problems.” Problems are questions raised for solution; the term suggests that they are more likely to be posed as homework than for diversion, but this is a matter of connotation. Essentially puzzles and problems are the same. But if all puzzles or problems are games, we are in left in the difficult situation in which “2 + 2 = ?” is a game. That question is a puzzle, however uninteresting it may seem, <cite id="note_4">“2 + 2 = ?” may actually be a slightly interesting puzzle. On a planet in which the inhabitants have two fingers on each of their two hands, the answer is likely to be “10,” since such creatures would probably use base 4 arithmetic.</cite> but it rightly seems difficult to swallow as a game. It is more sensible to define games as contests and also allow the existence of puzzles and problems that are not games. Defined this way, a crossword puzzle is a puzzle, not a game; “Let’s see who can finish the crossword puzzle first” is a game. Similarly, chess is a game; the knight’s tour is a puzzle that uses the gaming equipment and rules for movement from the game of chess.</p>
<p>Whether called puzzles or problems, challenges do play an important role in almost all IF. However, the concept of “problem” helps no more than does “puzzle” in connecting these challenges to the narrative world presented in IF. It is this connection, and the establishment of systems that have meaning outside of their own closed workings, that is the excellence of the IF form.</p>
<h2>Riddle</h2>
<p>The connection of a puzzle or problem to issues in the world (not only the world of the IF work but the world that we inhabit) of the sort that literature engages is best seen in the figure <span class="lightEmphasis">riddle</span>. The riddle, as discussed here, is a didactic form of poetry, not a response-format light-bulb joke. A famous riddle that was said to confound Homer is: “Those we have caught we left behind, those that have eluded us we carry with us.” <cite id="note_5">The answer gives the title to W. S. Merwin’s third book of poetry, <span class="booktitle">The Lice</span>. I am indebted to Will Hochman for pointing out how this riddle is an excellent figure for how the most puzzling aspects of literature are those that stay with us.</cite> There are many examples from Greek and Latin that remain current in our culture; the English tradition of the riddle begins, in writing, at the very beginning of written English literature, with the Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book.</p>
<p>Many works of IF simply contain riddles which must be solved in order to progress, but it is more useful to consider not the explicit presence of riddles in IF but the riddle as a figure for how IF works. The best examples of IF do what the best riddles do: they create a provocative system of thought that one is invited to enter, explore, and understand demonstrating one’s understanding, at last, by explicitly offering a solution.</p>
<p>A puzzle in the mainframe <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> (which appears in the commercial <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> I) <cite id="note_6"><span class="booktitle">Zork</span> was modified, split into three works which contain some new material, and published as <span class="booktitle">Zork IñIII</span>. This trilogy was sold for a wide variety of personal computers by Infocom, a company founded by the <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> creators and fellow students and researchers from MIT. <span class="booktitle">Zork IñIII</span> have been made available for free download by Activision, which acquired Infocom in 1986: <a class="outbound" href="http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html">http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html</a>.</cite> provides a example that is not spectacular but is concise enough to relate here: in a coal mine there is a machine, similar in appearance to a washing machine. <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> simulates a world in which magic and technology coexist, where the adventurer’s goal is to acquire all possible treasures. Nearby there is a heap of coal. The treasure here must be not located, but manufactured. By placing the coal in the machine and turning it on (this procedure requires a bit of figuring out), the coal is converted under pressure into a diamond. The puzzle requires some awareness of the properties of carbon, and also requires that the interactor understand that the system of this world is one in which engineers have, in many cases, provided useful devices in appropriate places.</p>
<p>A good scientist might happen upon the solution experimentally by placing different items in the machine and turning it on. What gives this puzzle the qualities of a riddle, if not the excellence of the best riddles, is that it is consistent with the logic of the world in which it occurs. More elaborate and poignant puzzles, tied in riddle-like ways to the worlds in which they occur and to the world outside, achieve more provocative and profound results. The riddle, unifying the literary and puzzle-solving aspects of IF, is the central figure in this form’s poesis.</p>
<h2>Machine</h2>
<p>A work of IF is not an “electronic document.” It is a program, parsing input and generating output based on rules. One reason that IF has been overlooked by hypertext theorists is that IF is not hypertext by most of the conflicting definitions that are offered; the view of it as a network of linked text is particularly strained and hides important aspects of IF. A broad category that recognizes the nature of IF and other new media artifacts as programs, such as Espen Aarseth’s (1997) cybertext, offers many critical benefits. It helps one understand that certain frustrations with IF are due to difficulty with or unwillingness to <span class="lightEmphasis">operate a machine</span> in order to generate text, and certain pleasures of IF come from engaging in this text/machine operation, or from reading that takes place in the context of operation.</p>
<h2>Defining Interactive Fiction</h2>
<p>A work of interactive fiction is a program that simulates a world, understands natural-language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world. This definition includes everything that is commonly held by IF authors and interactors to be IF, excludes new media artifacts that are similar but not commonly held to be IF, and sheds light on the elements that are truly essential to the form:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Simulation of a world</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Natural-language understanding</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Natural-language generation</p>
<h2>Understanding Interactive Fiction</h2>
<p>By definition, IF is neither a “story” or a “game,” but, as all IF developers know, a “world” combined with a parser and instructions for generating text based on events in the world. The riddle is central to understanding how the IF world functions as both literature and puzzle. Interestingly, the riddle is a part of the literary tradition of poetry, not that tradition of the novel more often associated with IF. This means that despite the common nomenclature of IF works as “games,” the IF program as a “story” file, and the work of IF as an electronic “novel,” none of these three figures are of central importance to IF.</p>
<p>It’s time to look beyond “story” and “game” for those other figures that are essential to different sorts of new media artifacts, and to recognize that views of “story” and “game” as simple overarching categories can be counterproductive. Rather than only race back and forth between narratology and game studies for further insights into the “story” and “game” of IF, for instance, it makes sense for those seeking to understand IF and those trying to improve their authorship in the form to consider the aspects of world, language understanding, and riddle by looking to architecture, artificial intelligence, and poetry. <cite id="note_7">I continue the discussion of the nature of IF, describe the history of the form, and approach some of the major IF works critically in my book <span class="booktitle">Twisty Little Passages</span> (The MIT Press, 2003).</cite></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="murrayr1">Janet Murray responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="laurelr2">Brenda Laurel responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="montfortr2">Nick Montfort responds</a></p>
<h2>References: Literature</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>—. (2001). <span class="booktitle">Comparative Media Studies Seminar</span>, MIT, February 8, 2001.</p>
<p>Aristotle (translated by S. H. Butcher, introduction by Francis Fergusson (1961). <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>. New York: Hill and Wang.</p>
<p>Buckles, Mary Ann (1985). “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of California San Diego.</p>
<p>Herz, J.C., Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, Ken Perlin, Celia Pearce, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Eric Zimmerman (2001). “Game-Stories: Simulation, Narrative, Addiction.” Panel at SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, August 17, 2001.</p>
<p>Juul, Jesper (2001). “Games Telling Stories?,” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (July 2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts">http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts</a>.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System,” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University.</p>
<p>—. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. Boston: Addison Wesley.</p>
<p>Lebling, P. David, Mark S. Blank and Timothy A. Anderson (1979). “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” <span class="journaltitle">IEEE Computer</span> 12 no. 4 (April 1979): 51ñ59.</p>
<p>Nelson, Graham (2001). <span class="booktitle">The Inform Designer’s Manual</span>, 4th edition. St. Charles, Illinois: The Interactive Fiction Library.</p>
<p>Pinsky, Robert (1997). MIT Media Lab Colloquium, February 5, 1997.</p>
<p>Prince, Gerald (1973). <span class="booktitle">A Grammar of Stories</span>. The Hague: Mouton.</p>
<p>Randall, Neil (1988). “Determining Literariness In Interactive Fiction.” <span class="booktitle">Computers and the Humanities</span> 22: 183ñ191.</p>
<p>Shelley, Bruce, Warren Spector, and Eric Zimmerman (2000). “Aesthetics of Game Design.” Panel at Computers and Video Games Come of Age, MIT, February 11, 2000.</p>
<p>Shklovsky, Victor (translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965). “Art as Technique.” In <span class="booktitle">Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays</span>. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Will Crowther (1975) and Don Woods (1976). 1975/1976.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Amnesia</span>. Thomas M. Disch, programmed by Kevin Bentley; Electronic Arts. 1986.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Curses</span>. Graham Nelson. 1993.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Exhibition</span>. Ian Finley. 1999.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Galatea</span>. Emily Short. 2000.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>. Steven Meretzky; Infocom. 1985.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span>. Robert Pinsky, programmed by Steve Hales and William Mataga; Synapse/Br¯derbund. 1984.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>. Adam Cadre. 1998.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Trinity</span>. Brian Moriarty; Infocom. 1986.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Zork</span>. Timothy Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling; Infocom. 1977ñ1979.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-ann-buckles">mary ann buckles</a>, <a href="/tags/jc-herz">j.c. herz</a>, <a href="/tags/henry-jenkins">henry jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/ken-perlin">ken perlin</a>, <a href="/tags/celia-pearce">celia pearce</a>, <a href="/tags/noah-wardrip-fruin">Noah Wardrip-Fruin</a>, <a href="/tags/eric-zimmerman">eric zimmerman</a>, <a href="/tags/game-story">game-story</a>, <a href="/tags/jesper-juul">jesper juul</a>, <a href="/tags/games-telling-stories">games telling stories</a>, <a href="/tags/brenda-laurel">brenda laurel</a>, <a href="/tags/computers-theatre">computers as theatre</a>, <a href="/tags/zork">zork</a>, <a href="/tags/graham-nelson">graham nelson</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1055 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comTowards a Game Theory of Gamehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/tamagotchi
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Celia Pearce</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-07-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Introduction: Why Game Theory</h2>
<p>In mapping the trajectory of popular media, we can see a clear corollary between theory and practice. Literature, film, even popular music all began to a certain extent as “folk” genres that, once their cultural relevance had been proven lasting, caught the attention of theorists and entered into academic discourse.</p>
<p>Such a cycle is currently underway vis-à-vis computer games. This medium is still erroneously considered to be in its “infancy.” (In fact, it is just coming of legal drinking age in some states.) The evolution of a body of theory on computer games is an exciting prospect. As with other media, it promises to broaden and deepen the discourse of the medium (we can start talking about something beyond violence, for example). In addition, if history is any indicator, it will also have a positive influence on the practice of creating games, just as the development of film theory in the sixties and seventies did on film craft. It is ironic that academia, the birthplace of games, has mostly shunned them until recently. It is also quite appropriate that MIT, where the first computer game – <span class="booktitle">SpaceWar</span> – was created as an independent hack by computer science Ph.D. students, was one of the first places to embrace game design and game culture as a subject of academic study. Here I will invoke MIT’s own Henry Jenkins, who stated in his January 2001 presentation at “Entertainment in the Interactive Age,” at the University of Southern California, that the most significant evolutionary leap in the film craft occurred when people started writing about it.</p>
<h2>Repurposing Theory</h2>
<p>Because computer game theory is a relatively new discipline, much of what has emerged thus far has come out of theorists from other disciplines absorbing game theory into their purview. It seems axiomatic that there must always be a phase where established media seek to “repurpose” their existing “assets” for use in the new medium. Most notably, film and literary theorists have begun to discuss game theory within their own idiosyncratic frameworks. These disciplines have much to add to the discourse on games, particularly when the discussion is centered on narrative. However, they are missing a fundamental understanding of what games are about. Because of this, they continue to struggle to “fit a square peg into a round hole,” so to speak, by attempting to force games into their own notions of narrative and “text.” To quote the old adage, “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The result is a kind of theoretical imperialism which those in the gaming world are scarcely aware of, let alone involved with. A small handful of significant theorists, such as Henry Jenkins, J.C. Herz, and Janet Murray, have moved game theory into its own realm by helping to define and articulate what is unique to games and game culture, even while comparing games to other media.</p>
<p>A number of debates have been raging about the definition and role of “narrative” in games. It seems only natural that people who have considerable expertise in other narrative media would seek to bring their own knowledge to bear in this argument. However, it is very important to understand that narrative has a profoundly different function in games than it does in other narrative-based media. In games, narrative structures operate in a comparable but at the same time diametrically opposed way to that of traditional narratives. And although there is much to be learned from traditional narratives, and a great value in drawing comparisons between the two, without understanding the fundamental differences, the discourse becomes ultimately irrelevant because it entirely misses the fundamental point of what games are about.</p>
<h2>A Play-Centric Approach</h2>
<p>The first and most important thing to know about games is that they center on PLAY. Unlike literature and film, which center on STORY, in games, everything revolves around play and the player experience. Game designers are much less interested in telling a story than in creating a compelling framework for play.</p>
<p>If we begin with this fundamental fact, it enables us to look at narrative in a play-centric context, rather than a “storytelling” context. At its highest level, the function of narrative in games is to engender compelling, interesting play. The reason that narrative games have gained such popularity is because they borrow what is engaging and interesting about other forms of narrative and use it to enhance the play experience. Where interactive narrative tends to fail is where the model is based on interacting with a linear narrative genre, such as interactive movies. Interactive “novels” have been slightly more effective from a critical perspective, but they have made virtually no impact on the mainstream of interactive media.</p>
<p>Narrative, again, operates at a fundamentally different level in games than it does in other media. A game is most simply described as framework for structured play. In most cases, this structure will include some type of goal, obstacles to that goal, and resources to help you achieve the goal, as well as consequences, in the form of penalties and rewards (which can often translate into obstacles and resources). At its simplest level, these elements create a generic deconstructed narrative structure of sorts. The author has identified six different narrative “operators” that can exist within a game; the first is clearly a component of all games, by definition. The second through fourth can exist in various combinations, or not at all:</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Experiential</span>: The emergent narrative that develops out of the inherent “conflict” of the game as it is played, as experienced by the players themselves.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Performative</span>: The emergent narrative as seen by spectators watching and/or interpreting the game underway.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Augmentary</span>: Layers of information, interpretation, backstory, and contextual frameworks around the game that enhance other narrative operators.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Descriptive</span>: The retelling of description of game events to third parties, and the culture that emerges out of that.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Metastory</span>: A specific narrative “overlay” that creates a context or framework for the game conflict.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Story System</span>: A rule-based story system or kit of generic narrative parts that allows the player to create their own narrative content; story systems can exist independent of or in conjunction with a metastory.</p>
<p>A good game, even one without an obvious “storyline” (or <span class="lightEmphasis">metastory</span>), while being played, will tend to follow something that resembles the emotional curve of a dramatic arc. A great example of this would be basketball. At its heart is the dynamic “conflict” between the teams, and subconflicts among the individual players, including players within a team. This is the <span class="lightEmphasis">experiential</span> aspect, the narrative that <span class="lightEmphasis">emerges</span> as a product of the play itself, between the players. To the spectator, this translates into a <span class="lightEmphasis">performative</span> drama which the viewer experiences in the third person, but which also has an equal amount of dramatic impact. This aspect of the narrative is enhanced by the <span class="lightEmphasis">augmentary</span> content of journalistic reportage that the spectator has access to before, during and after the game. This content takes the forms of the numerous subplots that are layered over the game itself, such as conflicts between teammates, personal narratives of players, city rivalries, etc. The <span class="lightEmphasis">descriptive</span> aspect of basketball, which is captured primary through postgame sports coverage, operates in the retelling of the game afterward. Some games, while rife with narrative suspense during game play, may tend to lose something in the translation. As J. C. Herz has pointed out, golf may be fun to play, but it doesn’t make much of a story after the fact. In basketball, the descriptive element is almost always accompanied by augmentary elements, which tend to carry through before, during and after the game itself. These capture the personal, behind-the-scenes narrative, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”</p>
<p>Although basketball provides an excellent example of the first four narrative operators described previously, it includes neither a metastory nor a story system. It’s important to realize that in many games, particularly precomputer games, narrative operates on a much more abstract level than it does in other narrative media. In board games, for example, the metanarrative generally functions as a metaphorical overlay for a mathematical or logical structure. Thus, a game can be deconstructed for its “pure” structure, as well as its narrative overlay or metastory. They key to game narrative is that it is, by definition, incomplete. It must be in order to leave room for the player to bring it to fruition. This is one of the primary flaws of applying literary or film theory to games; the authorial control, which is implicit in other genres, tends to undermine the quality of the user experience.</p>
<p>Some games are pure structure with no metastory. For example, Tic-Tac-Toe is a simple game that has a clear structure that results in a very compressed narrative arc on the experiential level. Needless to say, both its performative and descriptive properties are somewhat thin. And it has no metastory whatever. <span class="booktitle">Battleship</span>, on the other hand, can be deconstructed in terms of its pure logical construction (the positioning and targeting of objects in a grid), as well as its metastory, a battle between two seafaring fleets. Note the level of abstraction of the narrative in <span class="booktitle">Battleship</span>. Also note that there are no characters. In typical narrative texts, both literary and cinematic, characters are central to the conflict. You cannot really imagine a story without characters. In a game, on the other hand, it is quite possible, and often desirable, to have a narrative with no “characters” whatsoever. And in fact, well-developed characters often get in the way. Games tend to favor abstracted personas over “developed” characters with clear personalities and motivations. More abstracted characters leave more room for the player, and are therefore better suited to support a play-centric model.</p>
<p>Perhaps the best example of the ways narrative operates in a noncomputer game can be demonstrated by chess. Chess has a brilliant mathematical and logical structure that we can look at purely for its structural elegance. It has a clear experiential and performative arc. In addition, it has a metastory of two battling kings and their armies and minions (figure 12.1). To understand the narrative of chess, it might be helpful to compare it to a traditional narrative with a similar plot: Shakespeare’s <span class="booktitle">Macbeth</span>. Although both have a similar “storyline,” the comparison clearly highlights the profound difference in how narrative operates in each genre.</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12chess.jpg" width="455" height="341" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Figure 12.1: The chess set of King Edward II, Tower of London. (Photo by Celia Pearce)</span></p>
<p>In chess, the drama of the experience resides in the strategic conflict between the players, not in empathizing with characters, as in <span class="booktitle">Macbeth</span>. The metanarrative operates at a highly abstracted level, creating a context for this intellectual contest. It is interesting to note that this conflict between the players is played out entirely without the benefit of dialogue. Conversation often has a role in games, but in chess it is minimal. It is hard to imagine <span class="booktitle">Macbeth</span> without dialogue. Chess replaces the classic Aristotelian techniques of mimesis and empathy with the game-specific technique of agency by giving the player “avatars” that serve as representatives for his or her own actions.</p>
<p>As you can see, the distinction has profound implications in terms of narrative. Although both techniques involve projection of the player/audience into a character space, they do this in profoundly different ways. Empathy/mimesis requires the development of highly constructed and authored characters with which viewers develop an empathic bond. Agency creates a container for players to inhabit. Avatars must by definition have a certain level of ambiguity in their characters in order to allow the players to transpose or project themselves into them. Part of the technique of game design is making strategic decisions about how much and what sort of room to leave for the player.</p>
<p>In addition, chess has an ambiguous ideology or morality. There is no clear “good guy” or “bad guy.” <span class="booktitle">Macbeth</span> too employs a technique of ambiguous morality: although we know that Macbeth is someone we would not necessarily aspire to be like, we empathize with his struggle nonetheless. But the way these ambiguities are conveyed is very different. Chess has a sort of “Zen” quality of symmetry, equality and fair play. It is interesting that more recent games of military strategy, such as Risk, and its computer relatives such as <span class="booktitle">Age of Empires</span> and <span class="booktitle">Civilization</span>, utilize an asymmetrical structure in which all players do not start with equal assets. This technique can tend to enhance the drama, as well as the potential variations in the emergent narrative.</p>
<h2>Recent Examples</h2>
<p>To illustrate my points in terms of contemporary computer games, I would like to highlight two game genres in particular that I think have been successful because they are based on a play-centric model of narrative. Before doing so, however, I want to take a few moments to ponder the drawbacks of narrative within games.</p>
<p>Whereas narrative theorists, academics, and those engaged in a critique of games are obsessed with narrative, many game players find narrative quite problematic. The largest controversy has to do with the use of “cut-scenes,” also known as “cinematics.” These are linear segments within a game that are used to create a narrative context, or “reward” the player for having completed a mission or achieved a subgoal in the game. While often beautifully rendered (since typically they are not rendered in real time, they have the luxury of higher graphical quality), many players find cut-scenes to be egregiously interruptive to their play experience. It seems counterintuitive to use passivity as a reward for play. Many game players associate the idea of “narrative” with this type of enforced linearity, which is a throwback to cinema.</p>
<p>What are much more interesting, and I think are proving to be the so-called “killer apps” of narrative in gaming, are various procedural forms of narrative, which combine various levels of metastory and story systems. I am going to look at two genres in particular which have caused considerable groundswell, and by looking at them from a play-centric point of view, gain some perspective as to why they have been both critical and popular successes.</p>
<p>The first genre I’d like to look at is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or, in game culture parlance “MMORPG.” The two most popular of these are <span class="booktitle">Ultima Online</span> and <span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span>, and second-tier games include <span class="booktitle">Baldur’s Gate</span>, <span class="booktitle">Asheron’s Call</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Diablo</span>. Although they differ in some significant ways, what all these games have in common is that they create fantasy story worlds in which players improvise narratives in real time. These games, all of which share the common theme of medieval fantasy, represent the evolution of about forty years of popular culture converging on the computer. They can be traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien’s <span class="booktitle">The Hobbit</span>, and its sequels, which caused what can only be called a pop culture phenomenon starting in the 1960s. This highly elaborate imaginary world was tailor-made for interaction because, in Tolkien’s own words, the stories were developed as a means to explore the worlds. From this emerged the analog role-playing game <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span>, first introduced by TSR, Inc. in the mid-1970s, and its online text-based descendents, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons).</p>
<p>In many respects, the medieval fantasy genre MMORPG is a graphical MUD, and most of them still rely heavily on text for dialogue, although what used to be handled through textual descriptions (e.g., “You are stranding outside the castle, facing north”), is now done visually. This hybrid visual/text form has developed a small but adamant following, and although by game sales standards they are something of a niche market, these games have a great enough audience that they manage to at the very least support themselves as commercial endeavors.</p>
<p>The MMORPG combines a metastory, primarily in the form of a predesigned story world and various plots within it, with a story system that allows players to evolve their own narratives within the game’s story framework. The central play mechanic of the MMORPG is what I refer to as social storytelling, or collaborative fiction. The idea is that the story emerges as a direct result of social interaction. As with the Renaissance Faire (also a huge commercial success throughout the U.S.), players enter a fully constructed three-dimensional world. Rather than selecting fixed characters, they select particular character roles. These are somewhat generic, but allow players to configure unique characters composed of various traits, which they can then evolve over time into a fully developed persona through a system of improvisational collaborative narrative (figure 12.2).</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12tigers.jpg" width="504" height="378" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Figure 12.2: Screenshot from EverQuest: The Shadows of Luclin. (Verant, Sony Online Entertainment)</span></p>
<p>In traditional narrative, a classic view of character development is that characters are what they do. It is the actions of the characters that not only tell us who they are, but also determine who they are. The choices they make in a sense configure their personalities. In the MMORPG genre, this dynamic is put in the hands of the player. Players take actions that construct their characters on the fly. For example, depending on your role, you may be endowed with certain innate traits or talents, such as strength or intelligence or magical powers. You also have the opportunity to acquire skills. In games like <span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span> and <span class="booktitle">Ultima Online</span>, the game is structured in such a way as to make it beneficial for players to join forces and form spontaneous teams. As your team develops over time, your role on the team will cause your character, originally a generic kit of skills, to evolve distinctive personality traits. The strategies you choose in enacting your innate talents and acquired skills engage you in a process of real-time character creation. In addition, you can acquire property, including weapons, tools, magic amulets, and even real estate, which will all become part of your character’s unique personality. Some players choose to act out in an antisocial way. In many cases, these players are penalized by game operators, but just as often, they are penalized socially. For in these worlds, reputation is the most valuable currency.</p>
<p>These games, because they are highly improvisational in nature, require constant attention from their operators. <span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span>, for example, has a Command Central at its San Diego headquarters where its customer service staff wanders about the virtual game world assisting players, and creating narrative events, conflicts and missions for players to engage in. They carefully watch what players are doing and constantly evolve the game, the game rules, and the game narrative accordingly. Again, a play-centric model, in which the player is revered and constantly accommodated.</p>
<p>The result is an emergent narrative, a story that evolves over time as a result of an interplay between rules and players. In addition, there is the emergent infrastructure that is constantly reformulating itself, evolving, and adapting, much like an ecosystem, to the player behavior. Most of these games work on a product-plus-subscription economic formula: you purchase a CD at the software store, then pay a nominal monthly fee (seldom more than $20) for unlimited play. Although at present the audience for these games is relatively small compared to the mainstream, their fan base is extremely committed. MMORGs require a large time investment because they are strongly skills – and relationship-based. It requires a commitment of at least ten hours a week to maintain ongoing engagement in these games, and many players put in well above that. Interestingly, most of the original MMORPGs’ meta-stories focus on medieval fantasy/ <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span> style themes, although more mainstream themes are forthcoming, which will most likely expand the audience for this genre.</p>
<p>The second game genre we are going to look at, currently represented by one game and its various sequels and enhancements, is <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>, designed by Will Wright of Maxis. <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> evolved out of an entirely different tradition and genre in games, that of the simulation game. I want to note that there are two distinctly different types of games that are referred to as simulations. One is the training-based simulator, which comes out of the military world, and puts the player into a first-person role centering on mechanical control of a vehicle, e.g., a flight or tank simulator. The other is a simulation that dynamically models an entire system. This tradition comes from a variety of sources, but was used extensively in paper-and-pencil form in the social sciences, history, and economics in the 1960s and 1970s. <span class="booktitle">SimCity</span> was one of first computer games to employ techniques of this type of simulation in a game context, and at the time it was released (1989), it revolutionized the game experience and business. Since then, this genre has been expanded into a range of metastory contexts, including Maxis’ <span class="booktitle">SimEarth</span>, <span class="booktitle">SimAnt</span>, as well as <span class="booktitle">Roller Coaster Tycoon</span> by Microprose.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> has been described as a human behavior or psychological simulator. Rather than employing purely player-inhabited characters or purely autonomous characters, the game puts players in the role of influencing semi-autonomous characters. They are semi-autonomous because while they have their own innate behaviors, they depend on player influence to dictate their actions. The viewpoint is isometric rather than first person, allowing players to have a god-like view over the game terrain.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is a story system described as a kind of narrative Lego. Designer Will Wright himself describes it as a sort of virtual dollhouse. The original prototype was created as a physical model using model railroad materials. <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> uses the emergent narrative model, but leaves the metastory relatively open-ended. The original <span class="booktitle">Sims Game</span>, which has now spun off into a variety of add-ons and enhancements, is basically a domestic drama, or a sitcom, depending on how you play. You create a family and place them in a house that you can then enhance and occupy with a variety of items to better the Sims’ lifestyle and comfort level. There is a strong anticonsumerist satirical subtext to the game. I refer to it as the IKEA game, because a major feature is the catalogue of humorously described household items and enhancements (figure 12.3). The subtext is that characters need things to make them happy, but over time, the things begin to own them. A larger house requires more cleaning time. You can hire a maid, but the higher expenses require that you maintain a certain earning power. As your characters evolve, they form various relationships with each other. Some can even fall in love and form domestic partnerships, even same-sex partnerships.</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/simsone.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Figure 12.3: Build mode in The Sims, aka The IKEA Game. (Maxis, Electronic Arts)</span></p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is a cross between a dollhouse, a Tamagotchi, and the television program <span class="booktitle">Big Brother</span>. In <span class="booktitle">Big Brother</span>, contestants inhabit an enclosed house for eighty days, eliminated one-by-one by audience vote until only one roommate is left standing. As in <span class="booktitle">Big Brother</span>, the <span class="booktitle">Sims</span> player is a voyeur with an all-seeing eye and definite influence on the characters, even though they also have their own “free will,” so to speak. You must maintain a constant vigil over them or calamity might result. Characters without adequate cooking skills can perish in kitchen fires, and children can be taken from negligent parents by social services.</p>
<p>Sims characters are built from a kit of character parts that includes various physical (mostly having to do with appearance), as well as personal traits. The emphasis here is more on personality than skills, however (figure 12.4). You can construct your own configuration of such traits as neatness, friendliness, etc., or you can select an astrological sign that will automatically configure a personality for you. Based on this, the character will have certain natural qualities and aptitudes. Your characters can also acquire skills that will enable them to avoid things such as kitchen fires, or improve their job performance, thereby earning promotions at work.</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/simstwo.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Figure 12.4.: Character kit in The Sims. (Maxis, Electronic Arts)</span></p>
<p>Sims are very moody and when they aren’t getting their needs meant, they will throw tantrums, shaking their fists and calling to you in “Sim-ish,” a combination of verbal gibberish and symbols that appear in comic book bubbles over their heads. Images such as food, kissing, and recreational activities provide indicators of what Sims want or what they are conversing about.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> has taken a radically different approach to narrative than most of the games that preceded it. In addition to a story system that results in an experiential narrative, <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> has a built-in descriptive component (a feature it shares with some of the MMORPGs) in the form of a “Family Album” feature that allows players to take snapshots of their game underway. They can then make descriptive storyboards and post them on <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> web site for others to view. As a result, a new play trend has emerged, in which players have transformed the game into a storyboard authoring tool (figure 12.5). Players have used it to recreate autobiographical or even news stories.</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12.5.1.jpg" width="198" height="210" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Figure 12.5.: Scenes from “A Lawn Gnomes Revenge” [sic], a player-created story using The Sims. Pete the Lawn Gnome makes an “anonymous” call to report the death of Bob, his lonely but devoted owner. (Maxis, Electronic Arts)</span></p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12.5.2.jpg" width="202" height="170" /></span><br /><span class="caption">The first of several failed attempts at killing Bob’s drunken son, Tony, who has inherited the house.</span></p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12.5.3.jpg" width="503" height="336" /></span><br /><span class="caption">With the help of an army of plastic pink flamingos, Pete succeeds in incinerating Tony.</span></p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/12.5.4.jpg" width="198" height="150" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Tony is destined to spend the rest of his days as a lawn ornament.</span></p>
<p>In addition, players can upload their games onto the site so that other players can continue the gameplay. In other words, if you create a family, you can put it up on <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> web site, and another player can pick it up where you left off. Thus, there might be multiple versions of your family, having been taken in different directions by different players.</p>
<p>The game also allows for skinning, which the MMORPGs sometimes (but not always) allow for. Skinning is the practice of pulling your own assets into the game. Most of the time, it consists of placing new texture maps on game environments or characters. Maxis encourages this sort of thing and has even created a trading post within the web site where players can exchange skins and other custom-built game features.</p>
<p>Part of why it is interesting to look at the <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> in terms of narrative fiction overall is that it represents an abdication of authorial control, or, perhaps more accurately, a shift in the definition of “author.” The creation of meta-stories and story systems has become a new form of authorship that is a sort of author/ nonauthor role. It is somewhat ironic in light of the “death of the author” debate that has raged in poststructuralist literary theory, from Barthes to Foucault to L’Dieaux, that it is games, rather than literature, that have been able to finally dispense or at least significantly reframe the author’s role as creator of content.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is a story system that lets the player drive the story experience within a set of carefully crafted rules, processes, and constraints. It blurs the line between audience and author in the same way the MMORPGs do, but with a more open-ended story framework. Furthermore, Maxis is developing even more interesting ways to blur that line. In his keynote address at “Entertainment in the Interactive Age,” Will Wright presented a diagram showing the role of players in content creation. His “pyramid” content scheme states that if the 10% of players who occupy the top level of the pyramid are defined as expert storytellers, then for every million players there are 100,000 people creating high-level game content. The idea here is that the “author” shifts into a role as facilitator, and the audience now takes over the role of storytelling.</p>
<p>Maxis is currently looking at ways to reward this top 10% of player/creators, either financially or with free game subscriptions, updates, etc. At this writing, Maxis is in development with <span class="booktitle">The Sims Online</span>, a massively multiplayer Sims world that players can co-inhabit. Here players will be able to start their own businesses and devise their own entertainment for other Sims characters.</p>
<p>This notion of authorial abdication is essential to understanding where game narrative diverges from other narrative media. Other narrative media focus on “text,” and text as a signifier of authorial authority. The text is fixed, and it has a single authoritative source. In some cases, that authoritative source might be a community, but nonetheless, the text is fixed. It may be open to a range of interpretation, and I will here take exception to those who say that all narrative is interactive. If we use the term as defined in the dictionary, interactive is by definition responsive. In other words, it must have a visibly different manifestation with each user’s individual input. A nonlinear book may arguably fall into this definition by virtue of the fact that the reader assembles its sequence as he or she reads. But a linear story does not allow for any variable manifestations, and therefore, by definition, it cannot be interactive.</p>
<p>Looking at the differentiations between game-based and other forms of narratives can give us some vital clues as to the pitfalls of transitioning between the two. Repeatedly, filmmakers have attempted to leverage the popularity of video and computer games. But if we review some of the points made above, we can easily see why the game-to-movie adaptation has repeatedly failed.</p>
<p>The number one reason is that the function of character in each medium is diametrically opposed. The contrast between Macbeth and the chess king sheds light on why <span class="booktitle">Mario Brothers</span>, <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> have made disappointing films. One only has to imagine chess as a stage play to understand why these transitions consistently fail. In the game <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span>, Lara Croft is a partially formed character; she is in essence a cartoon who serves as an avatar onto which the player is meant to project her – or more often, his – own interpretation. It is important that the character is incomplete, because if the character is too developed there is nothing compelling for the player to contribute. I frequently liken game design to having a good conversation: in order for it to work, you have to listen, which means leaving gaps for the other person to fill. Taking a caricature that has been created as a vehicle for player projection and trying to develop it into a full-blown cinematic character is a dangerous game to play, so to speak.</p>
<p>Reverse adaptations have been slightly more successful, but it’s important to understand why. Generally a game version of a film character will need to be streamlined. Some characters, such as Indiana Jones, are cartoony-enough that they can easily transition into game characters. In <span class="booktitle">Blade Runner</span>, the designers at Westwood Studios chose not to use the main character in the movie, but developed a new character broadly based on the film. Because the <span class="booktitle">Blade Runner</span> character is mysterious and ambiguous to begin with, this was an easier stunt to pull than taking a highly articulated, nuanced character and trying to develop it for a game. On the other hand, it may simply be that all characters played by Harrison Ford are particularly well-suited for game narratives.</p>
<p>In fact, a deeper analysis reveals that certain story genres are more innately gamelike to begin with. These include mysteries, mission or goal-based adventures, or combat scenarios. <span class="booktitle">James Bond</span> and <span class="booktitle">Mission: Impossible</span> are two examples of gamelike film genres that have transitioned into critically and popularly successful games. In any case, it seems that games are weaker at character development, whereas they excel at adventure, mystery, and action. Even non-movie-based games based on these themes, such as <span class="booktitle">Thief</span> and <span class="booktitle">Deus Ex</span>, have been the more popular among games that employ a more literal metanarrative.</p>
<p>The other sort of narrative genre that does well in a game framework is the world-based narrative. <span class="booktitle">The Hobbit</span> was an example cited earlier. In fact, Tolkien himself spent many years developing the world, its cultures and languages, and the story was really just a way to describe and explore the world. Any book that has a map in it is likely to be good material for a game, because it is clear that the game is about the relationship between the characters and the world.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span> is a great example of a story world that is tailor-made for gaming. The first movie is much more of a game than a film. As is the case in all the <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span> films, the characters tend to be archetypal and somewhat cartoon-like (Harrison Ford again!), which makes them perfect building blocks for game narrative. George Lucas’s strengths as a world-builder have resulted in story contexts that have proven to be endlessly fascinating to at least two generations thus far. At this writing, Verant, the creators of <span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span>, are developing <span class="booktitle">Star Wars: Galaxies</span>, a MMORPG based on the <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span> worlds. Based on sneak previews at E3, most game industry pundits are predicting a slam dunk. This is a case where the world will be complete, deeply developed and highly dynamic, but the story will be open-ended, to allow players to create their own narrative within this familiar imaginary space.</p>
<p>The most compelling thing about these trends is that they are changing the distinction between producers and consumers. In film, television, theater and literary forms, there is generally a very clear line between producer and consumer. However, in these new forms of interactive narrative, particularly those that employ story systems, this line has become blurred. The consumer is now becoming a producer/consumer.</p>
<p>Computer games are really the first medium that blurs this boundary between author and audience so completely. As such, it undermines some of the fundamental tenets of postindustrial (e.g., printing press, film projector, television) narrative, which is based on a mass-production, one-to-many “broadcast” model. With the computer as a two-way, dynamic medium, those engaged in game design are creating an entirely and radically new ideology about narrative. They are not so much storytellers as context creators, and what they are doing is nothing short of revolutionary. As such, I believe that they have earned their own unique and indigenous theoretical discourse.</p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/possible">Mark Bernstein responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/destined">Mary Flanagan responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/metric">Celia Pearce responds</a></p>
<h2>References: Literature</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>Associated Press (2001), “Video Game Industry Reports Growth.” <span class="booktitle">The Times of India Online</span>, May 1, 2001.</p>
<p>Barthes, Roland (translated by Steven Heath) (1968). “The Death of the Author.” In <span class="booktitle">Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader</span>, edited by David Lodge. London and New York: Longman. First published as “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia 5 (1968).</p>
<p>Interactive Digital Software Association (2001). “New Research Commissioned by the IDSA Shows Major Impact of Computer and Video Game Industries on the US Economy.” IDSA web site, May 2001. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.idsa.com">http://www.idsa.com</a>.</p>
<p>Jenkins, Henry (2001). Presentation at “Entertainment in the Interactive Age,” at the University of Southern California, January 2001.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span>. Verant Interactive; Sony Online Entertainment. 1999.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>. Will Wright; Maxis; Electronic Arts. 2000.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Star Wars: Galaxies</span>. LucasArts; Sony Interactive; Verant. 2002.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/videogames">videogames</a>, <a href="/tags/spacewar">spacewar</a>, <a href="/tags/performance">performance</a>, <a href="/tags/performative">performative</a>, <a href="/tags/jc-herz">j.c. herz</a>, <a href="/tags/basketball">basketball</a>, <a href="/tags/tic-tac-toe">tic-tac-toe</a>, <a href="/tags/chess">chess</a>, <a href="/tags/macbeth">macbeth</a>, <a href="/tags/shakespeare">shakespeare</a>, <a href="/tags/aristotle">aristotle</a>, <a href="/tags/zen">zen</a>, <a href="/tags/risk">risk</a>, <a href="/tags/age-empires">age of empires</a>, <a href="/tags/civilization">civilization</a>, <a href="/tags/mmorpg">MMORPG</a>, <a href="/tags/ultima-online">ultima online</a>, <a href="/tags/baldurs-gate">baldur&#039;s gate</a>, <a href="/tags/asherons-call">asheron&#039;s call</a>, <a href="/tags/diablo">diablo</a>, <a href="/tags/jrr-tolki">j.r.r. tolki</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator993 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com